Power Wars Blog by Charlie Savage

The law that supports the NSA/FBI warrantless surveillance program, the FISA Amendments Act Section 702, is set to expire on December 31, 2017, if Congress does not act to extend it. There are a proliferating array of rival bills to do so, some with modest reforms, some with sweeping reforms, and some with scant or

This is the draft manager’s amendment to H.R. 3989, the “USA Liberty Act,” which would extend the expiring FISA Amendments Act Section 702 warrantless surveillance law but impose some changes to it, and which is being pushed by bipartisan leadership in the House Judiciary Committee. It’s been circulating for several days. Among other things, it

Today the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is marking up, in secret, Chairman Burr’s bill to extend the FISA Amendments Act Section 702 warrantless surveillance program, the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act. While the bill is not yet public, I published a copy here yesterday, alongside a revised draft of the Goodlatte-Conyers House Judiciary Committee bill,

Lots of legislative action on FISA Amendments Act Section 702 warrantless surveillance is happening with drafts that are not public even though they are not classifed. Here are some. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on October 24, 2017, will mark up – behind closed doors – a bill being pushed by its chairman, Senator

The National Security Agency has declassified a third (and final) tranche of previously unreleased documents from the docket of a then-secret 2011 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court case over upstream Internet surveillance conducted under the FISA Amendments Act/702 program. Here are the first and second tranches. This third tranche is long a dense – nearly 350 pages – but

Among surveillance legal policy specialists, it is common to cite a set of statistics from an October 2011 opinion by Judge John Bates, then of the FISA Court, about the volume of internet communications the National Security Agency was collecting under the FISA Amendments Act (“Section 702”) warrantless surveillance program. In his opinion, declassified in

**UPDATE: Problem fixed, many thanks to John Musser of Digerati Designs.** Several readers have brought to my attention that the web page containing the index to the hardcover edition of Power Wars will not load; it appears to have become corrupted. Unfortunately it is so far proving to be beyond my WordPress skills to fix this

Yesterday, Federal District Court Judge Christopher Cooper issued an unusual 14-page ruling in a Freedom of Information Act case brought by Protect Democracy and a preliminary injunction ordering the government to expedite its processing of the matter. The lawsuit is seeking documents laying out the Trump administration’s legal rationale for the United States’ April 6

[Cross-posted to Lawfare] Today, Hachette is publishing the paperback edition of my history of Obama-era national-security legal policymaking, Power Wars, which is also replacing the text future e-book buyers will receive. I have systematically updated and revised the book since its hardcover publication in November 2015. A few months ago, over coffee in Cambridge, Jack

Here are some newly declassified documents from a FISA lawsuit that add to the historical record of the MCT issue that arose in 2011. They provide a little bit more information about the sequencing of the case before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the questions that Judge John Bates was asking. I don’t immediately

Power Wars provides “a master class in how to think seriously about crucial aspects of the [war on terrorism]. … comprehensive, authoritative … essential and enthralling.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Already classic…there is no other work quite like it.”

—The Jerusalem Post

Power Wars explores “in intricate detail nearly every major issue in Obama’s national security policy: detainees, military commissions, torture, surveillance, secrecy, targeted killings, and war powers. Its behind-the-scenes story will likely stand as the definitive record of Obama’s approach to law and national security.”